The .NET Framework blog published this morning a guest post from yours truly on .NET Memory Allocation Profiling with Visual Studio 2012. As you're trying to improve the performance, throughput, and memory usage of code that uses Tasks, the described profiler in Visual Studio can be a valuable tool in your tool belt (of course, the example I ...
A few years back, Wes Dyer wrote a great post on monads, and more recently, Eric Lippert wrote a terrific blog series exploring monads and C#. In that series, Eric alluded to Task<TResult> several times, so I thought I’d share a few related thoughts on Task<TResult> and the async/await keywords.As both Wes and Eric highlight, a mo...
I can be a bit sensitive when it comes to language and how concepts are conveyed. I think it’s important to be accurate, even if not precise, when describing what something is or how to use it, as otherwise the folks to whom you’re communicating can easily form the wrong mental model for that thing. Having a good mental mode...
Lucian Wischik and I presented an "async clinic" at the MVP Summit in Bellevue this week. The async/await keywords in C# and Visual Basic drastically simplify asynchronous programming, but that of course doesn't mean that using them is without any gotchas: the goal of the discussion was to highlight some of the key areas in which&nb...
These days it’s not uncommon for me to receive an email or read a forum post from someone concerned about a problem they’re experiencing with an async method they’ve written, and they’re seeking help debugging the issue. Sometimes plenty of information about the bug is conveyed, but other times the communication is voi...
Recently I was writing an app that processed a bunch of files asynchronously. As with the Windows copy file dialog, I wanted to be able to provide the user with a button that would pause the processing operation.To achieve that, I implemented a simple mechanism that would allow me to pass a “pause token” into the async method, whi...
